I'm no tech professional - I'm not even an advanced user - but I have so much shit I need to procrastinate on today, that I'm gonna give this a try.
Firstly, I'm not sure what the view you're arguing is, because that little blurb you give in your OP is essentially a rant about the layout of the apple preferences menu. Is your view that the apple preferences layout is inferior and therefore apple is worthless and conning people? That seems quite hyperbolic. So I'll just go off on my own and write up my own narrative of 1) what value Apple adds to the consumer electronics industry, and 2) why Apple is a successful interface for the average consumer.
There was a wonderful piece in Time a couple weeks back about the new Apple watch. It started out with a metaphor: Apple is a vulture that scours the market for clunky, failed technology and reinvents it into something everybody wants. I'm not expert enough to assess this statement, but Time says it galvanized the walkman market, then the smartphone market, then the tablet market, and now the electronic watch market. If this is indeed true, then Apple is deservedly one of the most valuable companies in the tech industry, because it is able to generate consumer demand. Innovation in a capitalistic economy is driven by the profit motive, and profit itself is generated from sales. Apple generating the first demand boom for smartphones, for instance, is what creates incentive for engineers at other companies to create better, more innovative products in this sector. Consider that now, many non-Apple tablets and smartphones occupy the same product category as the iPhone and iPad, and in some cases they are even more innovative, attractive, easy to use, and bang-for-your-buck than the original Apple product. Especially as regards the smartphone, Apple was the real trailblazer here for other companies - it pioneered the design and functionality fundamentals of the phone.
As regards the user experience, I will speak to myself. When I was choosing between the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Note this year, I went with Android because, largely, of how much more functional it is. I like not having to go through specifically my computer's iTunes to download films and music. I like not having to pay a shit ton of money for apps. I like that I can transfer all sorts of files onto my phone without worrying about their compatibility with the mac interface and how much it's gonna cost me. However, I have to say, the transferability is nowhere near as seamless as with mac. I would agree that Apple software tends to treat its users like children, but I disagree that that's a bad thing, because many people don't want to bother with the intricacies. They want to pay their $.99 for a song and immediately have it on all of their devices, and seamlessly transfer it between them. They don't want to download third-party apps and zip things up in all sorts of formats to transfer them between devices. Apple software takes all of that preliminary busywork out of the equation, at a premium, of course.
Another huge Apple innovation is the app store. Apple was the first to come up with it, obviously, but that's not the salient thing: unlike Android, Apple moderates the app store. That means there are fewer dead and low-quality apps available to the user, and developers have more incentive to make their apps better the first time. For instance, 8tracks, which is not a niche app, crashes my Android with annoying regularity, and 4 months and 3 updates later, they still haven't fixed it! I simply don't have these problems with my Apple products. Yes, their capabilities are severely reduced and if they break, fixing them is a bitch, but when everything's working fine, the Apple computing experience is just so much easier than anything I've experienced with any other OS or hardware.
tl;dr your technology should adapt to your needs. if you don't like Apple, don't use it, but you don't really have a case for why Apple is bad here.